Does Slow Horses' Slough House Really Exist?

Like the misfit sleuths on which it's focused, "Slow Horses" has taken a while to reach its full potential. That's not to say it hasn't been great from the beginning, but streaming on Apple TV (which has lots of great shows that nobody is watching) means the series has taken some time to find a significant audience. Following its fifth season, "Slow Horses" is garnering the attention it deserves, and fans will no doubt have questions. Many might be wondering whether Slough House itself is real, and while the MI5 dumping ground for burnout spies is based on real locations, it's not an actual place. Still, fans can visit the London-based building used for exterior shots and the famous fire escape that leads up to the entrance.

There's so much to like about "Slow Horses," aka the best spy show on TV. From Gary Oldman's career best performance as the disheveled Jackson Lamb to the razor sharp writing, the series is one of the primary reasons why everyone should subscribe to Apple TV. What often gets overlooked, however, is the production design. 

Much of the show is shot on-location in London, but it's the interiors that really showcase the production team's understanding of the "Slow Horses" universe. Slough House itself is the perfect example. This dilapidated relic of 1960s brutalist design looks like it's been standing in Blighty for over half a century when, in fact, the convincingly rundown offices are all built on sound stages. Of course, those interiors are blended seamlessly with exterior shots to create the illusion that Lamb and his outcast spies are all working in the heart of London. That does, however, mean that Slough House doesn't technically exist in the same form it appears in the show, but the real-world locations very much do.

Based on Mick Herron's Slough House novels, "Slow Horses" follows the travails of MI5 operatives who have made such severe mistakes that they've been removed from the intelligence service's headquarters and dumped in an off-site location to become indefinite paper pushers. That office is Slough House, which you might not be surprised (but probably relieved) to learn doesn't actually exist. The British security service is not sequestering bumbling spies in a dilapidated hole above an Italian restaurant (or maybe it is — it's not like we'd know). But the Italian restaurant and the overhead flats glimpsed in the show itself actually do exist in Barbican, an area of central London known for the Barbican performing arts centre and Barbican Estate.

The exterior used for the Slough House facade is a real row of shops on the corner of 129 Aldersgate St, which runs alongside the Barbican Estate. That particular row of shops sits opposite the Estate itself and remains a distinctively British corner of London, with small independent shops sitting below a row of flats. As supervising location manager Ian Pollington told TimeOut London, "We've been incredibly fortunate because we haven't had that situation where Pret a Manger has taken a whole corner and everything's completely changed."

The dingy fire escape, up which Jackson Lamb and his crew must climb to enter Slough House, is located nearby on St. John's Street. According to Pollington, it's actually part of a service yard for another section of buildings. "It knits together well," the location manager noted.